2020: Hannah's Blog

My favorite picture of my 12-year-old sister, Sophie, as my continuous mood.

https://sites.psu.edu/siowfa16/2016/12/02/lucid-dreaming/ I'm typically a sucker for science podcasts and articles especially those medical or chemistry related. Sleep studies are such a fascinating mystery that I would love to participate in for research both on myself and in general.  My father struggles with insomnia and sleep apnea, of which I can't be sure he's had all of his life of developed it later in life. I definitely have sleeping problems. I can't be sure it's one thing exactly or if it's just because I have the typical college student sleeping schedule. The article I read was a transcript of an interview with sleep researcher from Harvard, Berkeley, Northwestern, and Mayo Clinic (we got the big boys out here). The discussion was quite lengthy to read but I was completely immersed in the topic range. The interview caught my eye because it presents how memory if a function of sleep. However, once you dive in, the experts touch upon a wide ...

https://www.verywellmind.com/what-pet-imagery-tells-us-about-social-anxiety-disorder-4104157 This week I chose an article called Recalibrating the Perfectionist Mind for growth mindset. I struggle with perfectionism for as long as I can remember. I used to believe that it was simply how I functioned and that I actually required an environment of high stress as a driving force to succeed to my standards. Now that I've matured some since then and have been exposed to extreme cases of poor mental states that I realized my mindset could actually be sabotaging my efforts.  Dr. Nair points out that perfectionism goes hand-in-hand with performance anxiety, which is interesting because it made me reflect on all the early signs of performance anxiety I had. As young as three years old I've been a dancer. I performed often in many styles including ballet, tap, jazz, hip-hop, and modern. Then as young as four years old, I started playing piano and performed often at recitals. I...

A Kiss Like No Other A newly wed couple went to Fuji for their honeymoon. For one of their planned activities, they planned to go bungee jumping off of Lover's Leap, a well-known geographical cliff. The wife was nervous and not as brave as her husband, so he stepped up to go first. He made it down safely and called up to his wife, "Come down and you shall receive a kiss like no other." The wife shakily peers over and stepped off the cliff. The bungee cord never pulled taut, and with a deafening snap , the wife's body laid crumpled at the foot of the cliff, feet away from her husband. The staff member on duty looked over the edge in horror with the safety clasps for the wife's harness in his hands. She received a kiss like no other, the kiss of death. The Tooth Fairy There were two sisters 10 years apart in age. One had all of her adult teeth, the other just lost her first baby tooth. The mother explained the phenomenon of the Tooth Fairy to the youngest. Ju...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_YB2FedY_o Once upon a time, there were two roommates and they had a platinum laptop. It was a special laptop, with immense power and can operate without Wifi anywhere in the world. But this they did not know, and sold it for a decent price to buy tickets to Lollapalooza. No sooner was the laptop gone than they began to grow dumber and dumber, and at last failed all of their classes that semester. They became stressed out and financially low since they had to pay for another extremely expensive semester to retake classes and ultimately miss Lollapalooza. They had a cat and a dog who suffered from this as well. Their owners were paying them less attention and food started running scarce. They two animals brainstormed ways to fix the problem. Finally, the dog hatched a plan. "They must get their laptop back" he said to the cat. "The laptop is in a safe guarded by the government, how will we manage that?", asked the cat. ...

This is a photo of me taken by my best friend when we visited her hometown in Wisconsin after spring finals last semester. This was the best point in my life so far. Picking Up the Pieces This piece is extremely personal, but I've decided to share solely because I've run out of times I can talk about this with my friends and family and I still don't "feel better". So, here's my attempt at "writing my feelings out" in hopes of healing. I can imagine it'll be lengthy, so I may right a series of biographies to finish what I have to say. 2019 changed my life. It shattered me. 2020 is the year I try to pick up the pieces. Last year was one of the best and worst years of my life. It was the best because I had found a group of friends I wanted to have for a lifetime. I quit rowing and kept my weight down, which is huge to me. School was going successfully and I had an internship lined up for the summer. I met my best friend and made memories...

http://mythfolklore.blogspot.com/2014/06/china-why-dog-and-cat-are-enemies.html This week I chose Chinese Fairy Tales. The style of these stories threw me off a little bit. There was a lot of tragedy and odd things for a fairy tale. The most bizarre story was the Cave of Beasts. I suppose in Chinese culture, the man of the house receives the "best" first, thus I understand his anger when he finds out the children ate all of his duck eggs. But did he really need that many duck eggs to himself? The mother in the story reminds me of my own in terms of putting her children's needs first. This is the strangest story, though, because the father gets SO mad about these precious duck eggs that he tosses just two of his many daughters into the wild where they could have been eaten alive. Instead, they lucked out and trapped their potential predators and looted some valuables they found... to which their terrible father takes as his own when he finally decides he misses his ...